Glyphland

Thursday, April 27, 2006

All hail Vijay, for he is beneficient and wise, having figured out the proper way to make torrents of old Michigan games for the masses. He has posted a torrent for the Michigan-Auburn Citrus Bowl of 2001 here for your downloading pleasure.

Some of you may be asking "what is a torrent and how much spyware does it come with?" Happily the answers are "total awesomeness" and "zero." BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer networking protocol that drastically reduces load for servers by using the largely dormant upstream capacity of other downloaders. In short, everyone downloads from one originator and everyone else downloading at the same time.

To use Bittorrent, you need a client program -- I use Azureus* -- and a torrent to download. Download and install your client, click on the torrent link, and viola: extremely large file on your hard drive. The most important thing to do when you download a torrent is to stay on the line after the download is complete, thus allowing other downloaders to use your bandwidth. This is called seeding. The more seeds, the faster everyone gets the file and the more the love gets spread.

*(Azureus is written in Java, so you may need the Java runtime if you haven't installed it already.)